时差N小时 数字零的由来(下)（在线收听）

Older cultures like the Babylonians used a marker of some sort to designate the space where no number goes, such as what comes between six and nine in the number six hundred and nine. The Greeks even used a round figure similar to the modern zero. It wasn’t until the Indian mathematicians got a hold of zero that people started thinking of it as a number that could be used as more than a placeholder for other numbers. It sounds weird, but that was a major step forward in mathematics!

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古文化比如巴比伦人用某种标记来指定没有数字的位置，比如数字609，6和9之间的数字位置。古希腊人用一个类似现代0的圆形数字来表示。直到印度数学家发明了0，人们才开始思考0对于其他数字来说不只可以用作一个占位符。听起来很奇怪，但那是数学界一个重要的进步。